Photo excitation and laser detachment of C<sub>60</sub> − anions in a storage ring

1 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Science and Technology, Aarhus University2 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Science and Technology, Aarhus University

DOI:

10.1063/1.4826097

Abstract:

We have studied the photo physics of C60 − anions in the electrostatic storage ring ELISA with ions produced in a plasma source and cooled and bunched in a He filled ion trap. A previous study using delayed electron detachment as a signal of resonance-enhanced multiphoton electron detachment (REMPED) has been repeated both at room temperature and with the trap cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature. However, wavelength dependence of the overlap of the strongly focused laser beam with the ion beam introduces distortions of the absorption spectrum. We have therefore applied a new method, combining the IR light with a slightly delayed, powerful UV pulse (266 nm). After absorption of three UV photons, the ions decay by delayed (thermal) electron emission, and time spectra are recorded for varying wavelength. The fraction of ions heated by absorption of a single IR photon is then extracted from a principal component analysis of these spectra. In good agreement with the earlier REMPED experiment, an origin band for transitions between the two lowest electronic levels of the anion, with t 1u and t 1g symmetry, is observed at 9380 cm−1, with strong sidebands from excitation of the two A g and eight H g vibrations. As before, a hot band is observed at about 9150 cm−1 and assigned to a transition from an excited vibronic Jahn–Teller state. However, an earlier observed band at higher energy, interpreted as a transition from this excited state to an excited vibronic state in the t 1g electronic level, is much weaker in the new measurements and could be an H g vibrational sideband. Also earlier studies of direct laser detachment from C60 − in the storage ring ASTRID have been revisited, with ions cooled by liquid nitrogen in the ion trap. We confirm the previous measurement with a determination of the threshold for s-wave detachment at 2.664 ± 0.005 eV, slightly lower than a recent value of the electron binding, 2.683 ± 0.008 eV, obtained from the energy spectrum of photo electrons. The detachment yield is observed to increase sharply for photon energies above a threshold at 2.78 eV, maybe caused by either Feshbach resonances or a shape resonance due to the presence of a bound electron state in the continuum.